Four Seasons Force the Future
by lilacsigil
Summary: Everything changes. Elektra, Abby and Stick are no exception.


Force the Future (Four Seasons) 

_Spring: Germination_

1. Money and an aura of power protected her from contact with the world.  
2. Killing was easier than caring.  
3. There was no time to assess and no time for dreams to slide into her sleep.  
4. Men occasionally crept uncomfortably close, but never for long.  
5. Excelling at a job where one slip would kill her took all her energy and thought.

1. Elektra fought hard to protect Abby and her father, Mark, from the Hand, and to save Abby from following her path.  
2. Why had she tried so hard to protect Abby from a life that Elektra herself had so deliberately constructed and maintained?  
3. It wasn't only to save Abby's father and spare the girl that grief Elektra held.  
4. It was about protecting Abby until she had a chance to make her own choices with a free heart and a free mind.  
5. Elektra was not free, and her shackles had been self-forged.

1. McCabe was dead, and his web of contacts invisible to Elektra, so it was peculiarly easy to step away from her assassination work.  
2. Elektra tried to fill her days with training, and her nights with guarding the house; she worked her body and senses to exhaustion, but nothing stilled her mind.  
3. After a few weeks, Elektra contacted her father's lawyers, to make sure that the house was hers beyond doubt, and found herself surrounded by men who had known her when she was a little girl, men she had to charm and obligate, not threaten.  
4. Securing the family home for Abby meant dedicating her mind, not her sai to the task, but this battle had purpose, and that gave Elektra strength.  
5. Change was harder than death, but Elektra would never surrender again.

It was time to be bound to others. It was time to be free.

_Summer: Bloom_

The fourteenth of June was Abby's mother's birthday. Elektra, returning after another futile week in New York with her father's lawyers, had to brake abuptly when Abby came sprinting down the driveway and stopped directly in front of the car.

"Your house sucks! I hate it here!" Abby yelled, angrily twitching her new string of warrior beads against her own legs.

Elektra removed her sunglasses, folded them neatly, then looked up at Abby, keeping her voice level and her gaze neutral.

"Why?"

"All your family's stuff is here, and it's like being wrapped up in dead people, in a grave. You shouldn't have made me come here!"

Elektra wanted to snap at her, ask her where else she might have gone, but hesitated long enough to bite back her instinctive attack. Instead, she stepped out of her car, grabbed Abby's hand and walked briskly into the house, pulling Abby along with her.

Abby was preoccupied with squirming and dragging on Elektra's hand but also eager to see where they were headed, so it came as a shock when Elektra strode to the edge of the pool and flipped Abby towards the water. Abby shrieked and twisted in mid-air, nearly making it back to the edge before hitting the water with a mighty and undignified splash.

"Bleargh!" Abby yelled as she surfaced, "What the hell did you do that for?"

Elektra looked down on Abby, who was treading water, then crouched at the edge of the pool.

"Every day, my father would bring me here and make me tread water until I sank. Then he'd fish me out and tell me I was a good girl. You're right about the ghosts. They're everywhere."

"Why did he do it?"

"To make me strong in a dangerous world. What he never told me was that he was one of those men who makes the world dangerous."

"Was he in the Hand?"

"No. They're not the only thing wrong with the world. My father did love me, I know that. But he couldn't love me enough to change. He couldn't make anything better."

Abby paddled her way to the edge.

"Are you going to make me swim until I sink?"

"No. Being forced to do things, even to please someone, doesn't make you strong. Just armoured. Brittle."

Elektra reached down, hauled the soaking wet girl out of the pool and looked into her face. "The Hand were trying to force your future, Abby. They wanted to make you grow into one of them."

"Is that why they killed my mom?" Abby snarled, suddenly hostile again.

"They killed my mother, too. And, I think, Typhoid's."

"That's just going to make me hate them! I never would've joined them. They're so lame!"

Elektra caught Abby's dripping wet fists and held them still.

"You'd never join them, but you would hate. You would hate, and lash out, and drown in your own evil. You're smart and inventive, Abby. There's no pain worse than the pain you inflict yourself. And nothing is more evil than not caring."

"You'd know! You murdered people!"

Abby pulled her hands back, but couldn't look away from the angry flicker in Elektra's eyes.

"Yes. I murdered them without passion and without thought, because I was angry and afraid, and because it kept me busy. Being an assassin used every part of me."

"But you stopped."

"It wasn't easy. Before, I thought I was free. It was a lie, but a comfortable lie."

"Do you hate us – do you hate me for making you change?"

Elektra laughed, startled.

"No! You saved me."

Abby's face lit up, and she grabbed Elektra's hands.

"This place can be alive. We don't need our ghosts. We just need – " Abby searched for the word.

"Respect? Honour?"

"Love."

_Autumn: Harvest_

Abby was out in the withered maze, idly running a stick along the twisted hedges. She couldn't remember the last time she had slept well, and it was becoming harder and harder to concentrate when she was training. Instead, she had taken to wandering the unkempt grounds of the Natchios family home, drifting aimlessly, until night returned.

There was a place that she always circled, but never quite reached, and that was the hole in the hedge that marked Typhoid's death. Abby seen the well where Kirigi had died, and the black splotch that marked Tattoo's demise, and neither had troubled her in the least, but the otherwise unremarkable piece of ground where Typhoid had died was mysterious and frightening.

As usual, once Abby had told herself she wouldn't do something, she immediately forced herself to do it. Dragging her stick behind her, she marched sternly through the maze, spiralling outwards from the well at the dead heart. She wound back and forth through the hedges to follow the series of holes that Elektra's fatal sai had left as it flew to end Typhoid's life, and save Abby's. The hedges hadn't grown back.

The earth where Typhoid had died was still blasted barren, except for a small patch of grass where Abby had been lying, her body protecting the living earth beneath. Abby stared for a moment, then sat herself down neatly on the grass, tucking her knees up to avoid the bare earth. Typhoid had lain Abby down here, and proceeded to suck the life out of her, laughing as Abby grew grey and cold.

Abby couldn't hate Typhoid, though, not in the casual way she hated Kirigi and the others for killing her mother and turning her life inside-out. She didn't know why: Typhoid had shown no hesitation in attacking her or Elektra, and Abby wasn't sorry that the woman was dead. But something in Typhoid's cold eyes had sparked when she had told Abby that she had been a Treasure, too, and Abby couldn't stop thinking of that look.

Typhoid had been jealous of her, and sitting in her tiny oasis in the scorched battlefield, Abby understood why: being the Treasure was important. It was a great balm for Abby's woes, and she was not looking forward to the day when, as Stick had unhelpfully said, "the honour will fall to another". She understood Typhoid's empty rage, just as Elektra understood Abby's, and that odd sense of commonality would not let her hate Typhoid.

Abby reached into her pocket and took out the rusty remnants of her old warrior beads, the ones Typhoid had twisted into decay. She poked them gently into the dirt where Typhoid had died, arranging the beads like a crown, just where Typhoid's head had briefly rested on the ashy dirt. Abby stood and looked down on the makeshift memorial, sad and relieved.

"Sleep well, sister."

_Winter: Quiescence_

The hedges are brown with cold and the heart of the maze still slightly oily underfoot, yellow discolouration spreading outwards from the well where Kirigi died. Elektra's stance is strong, and her strikes accurate. Stick stops every blow as if he is choreographing her movements.

Elektra has never been able to sense more than a few seconds into the future, but, living as she had done, this has been more useful than it has limiting. There is no need to sense what might be coming days or years into the future when it is just as easy to abandon her home and run ahead of the storm. Elektra had to concentrate and open her mind to be part of the stream of kimagure; she could choose when it would come to her.

Abby, however, seems to be able to go further, into undefined realms of possibility, and there is no way for Elektra to guide her. Abby's visions are mostly vague and unformed, but still enough to make her cry in her sleep, or lash out angrily at her father or Elektra for no reason that she could specify. Abby is not opening herself to kimagure; it is flowing through and over her like a storm-swelled river.

"Kimagure is not under your control, Elektra." Stick's voice is calm but laced with his usual subtle sarcasm, as if everything he said was something Elektra should have figured out on her own a long time ago.

"I know I don't control it, sensei, but it doesn't control me, either. Abby is hurting."

"Abby is strong. You are the one who has narrowed her vision."

"That's not fair – I needed to survive."

"You chose your anger, and you chose your actions." Stick turns his blind face to her, a slight smile on his lips. "Kimagure is hardly an art. It is caprice, Elektra, a whim of fate that we try to turn to our advantage. Life, death, the past and future – none of it is immutable. We touch the mind of the universe."

Elektra snorts, flicking her staff at Stick's knees.

"So if it's all whim and chance, why are the Hand so obsessed with finding the Treasure and killing her mother? Won't the Treasure manifest herself in time no matter what they do?"

"Elektra, their aim is to turn the Treasure to evil, so they may profit from the darkness and chaos that follows her choice. They are drawing out the rage and hurt, so they may be sure of the Treasure's path. Of your path."

"My choices were for me, wrong or right. Nothing to do with mystical wars. And now Abby is the treasure, and her heart is good."

"The war has not been won, Elektra."

Stick spins, and easily parries Elektra's aggressive lunge.

"Abby chose, didn't she? She never took the easy path, and she never gave up."

"She is a child, and children follow only two desires: kindness and selfishness."

Elektra steps back, holding her staff with a loose, defensive grip.

"Abby came to save me! You can't say that wasn't a choice for good."

"She followed you out of kindness, yes, to help you. And, in an encampment of warriors, she considered herself the only one who was able to help you. Selfishness."

Stick feints left, then brings his staff down across Elektra's knuckles, but she spins her staff swiftly over his and pins the weapon to the ground.

"You think her choice was wrong?"

"No. Only that it is not final. Nothing is."

He releases his trapped staff and it clatters to the ground. His bow is deep and sincere, and yet it annoys Elektra deeply, as if he had let her win.


End file.
